Branded

  XVII

  Aladdin's Lamp

  It is no part of my purpose to burden this narrative with the story ofthe development of our mine. Let it be sufficient to say that itspeedily proved to be one of the most phenomenal "producers" among thelater discoveries in the Cripple Creek district. The stories of suchspectacular successes have been made commonplace by the newspapers, andthat of the "Little Clean-Up" would--if I should give the real name ofour bonanza--be remembered and recognized by many who saw it grow byleaps and bounds from a mere prospect hole to a second "Gold Coin."

  To summarize briefly. Within a month we had settled down to businessand were incorporated, with Barrett as president, and Gifford, whochose his own job, resident manager and superintendent. Thesecretary-treasurership, combined under one office head, fell to me.With a modern mining plant in operation, the sinking and driving pausedonly at the hours of shift-changing; and after we began shipping inquantity our bank balances grew like so many juggler's roses--thisthough we had to spend money like water in the various lawsuits whichsprang up from day to day.

  Many of these suits were based upon cross-claims--contentions that wewere overlapping other properties--and most of these we were able tocompromise by buying off the litigants. By this means we acquired theentire area of the original triangle. When the news of our strikereached Nebraska, the owners of the Mary Mattock sought to break theirsale to us on the ground that we had stacked the cards against them.But our lawyers were too shrewd to be caught in such a flimsy net asthis. At Benedict's suggestion we drove a drainage tunnel on thepurchased property and unwatered the three shafts which the Nebraskanshad sunk; an expedient which enabled us to prove to the satisfaction ofthe courts that the Mary Mattock, at the time of its abandonment by itsoriginal owners, was nothing more than a series of prospect holes, andthat the property was valueless save for a dumping ground.

  Through all these bickerings and compromisings the Lawrenceburg fightheld on, giving us the most trouble and costing the most money.Blackwell proved himself to be a scrapper of sorts, leaving noexpedient untried in his attempts to tie us up and put us out ofbusiness. Shortly after we began developing in earnest, he put ashaft-sinking force on the nearest of the Lawrenceburg upper claims onthe hillside above us, hoping, as we supposed, to flood us out bytapping one of the numerous underground water bodies with which theregion abounds and turning it loose on us. At least, we could imagineno other reason for the move, since the growing dump at this upperworking was entirely barren of ore, and remained so.

  On our own part we were able to get back at Blackwell only in smallways. When he tried to shut us out of our wagon road right-of-way inthe gulch, we beat him in the courts and made him pay damages forobstructing us. Later, when his upper dump began to encroach upon ourground, we sued him again and got more damages, with a peremptory orderfrom the court to vacate.

  Still later we took Phineas Everton away from him. The assayer had hadsome disagreement with Blackwell, the nature of which was notexplained, but which I, for one, could easily understand, and Everton,apologetic now for his early suspicion of us, had told Barrett that hewas open to a proposal. The proposal was promptly made and weinstalled Everton as our assayer and expert in the town offices,fitting up a laboratory for him which lacked nothing that money couldbuy in the way of furnishings and equipment.

  Consequent upon this change, Barrett and I both saw more of theEvertons. They took a small house in town and Polly welcomed us both,making no distinction, so far as I could determine, between thepresident and the secretary-treasurer. Barrett's attitude toward Pollypuzzled me not a little. He was a frequent visitor in the cottage onthe hill, but he rarely went without asking me to go along. If he werereally Mary Everton's lover, he was certainly going about hislove-making most moderately, I concluded.

  I like to remember that I was loyal to him at this time in spite of thepuzzlement. It is perhaps needless to say that these cottage visitshad done their worst for me and I was hopelessly in love with thesweet-faced, honest-hearted young woman who had grown out of thebrown-eyed little girl of the Glendale school-days. Nevertheless, Iwas still able to recognize the barrier which my conviction,imprisonment and escape, together with the ever-present peril ofrecapture, interposed; also I was able to recognize Barrett's priorclaim, and the fact that he could leave wife and children the pricelessheritage of a good name and a clean record--as I could not.

  Touching this matter of peril, the period of our beginnings as acorporation was not without its alarms. Twice I had seen Kellow at adistance, and once I had stood beside him at the hotel counter where hehad been examining the registered list of names at a moment when I, allunconscious of his presence until I was elbowing him, had stopped inpassing to ask a question of the clerk. That near-encounter showed methat I was neither better nor worse than the man who had stood, loadedweapon in hand, on the sidewalk in the heart of a June night, coldlydeliberating upon the advisability of committing a murder. I wasconscious of a decent hope that Kellow wouldn't look up and recognizeme--as he did not--but coincident with the hope the homicidal devil waswhispering me to be ready with the pistol, without which I never wentabroad any more, even to cross the street from my rooms to the office.And I was ready.

  This mania, which seemed fated to seize me at any moment when myliberty was threatened, added another stone to the barrier of goodresolutions which I had builded in behalf of my loyalty to Barrett anda more or less chivalrous consideration for Mary Everton and her futurepeace of mind. If the ex-convict might not venture, the potentialman-slayer was at a still greater disadvantage.

  I recall, as vividly as if it were yesterday, how the first smallbreach was made in this barrier of good resolutions. Barrett and Iwere in Denver together, joining forces in our regular monthly fightwith the smelter pirates. We had been to the theater and were smokingbedtime cigars in the mezzanine lounge of the Brown Palace. I haveforgotten the name of the play we had seen, and even the plot of it;all that I recollect is that it turned upon the well-worn theme ofloyalty in love.

  Barrett seldom talked of himself or his past, even to me; and I wascloser to him, I think, than anyone else in the West. But the playseemed to have touched some hidden spring. Almost before I knew it hewas telling me of his college days, and of his assured future at thattime as the only son of a well-to-do New England manufacturer.

  "Those were the days when I didn't have a care in the world," he said."My father was the typical American business man, intent upon piling upa fortune for my mother and sister and me. I couldn't see that he waswearing himself out in the effort to get ahead, and at the same time togive us all the luxuries as we went along; none of us could see it.His notion was to put me through the university, give me a year or soabroad, and then to take me into the business with him. . . . Don'tlet me bore you."

  "You are not boring me," I said.

  "Then there was the girl: that had been arranged for both of us, too,though we were carefully kept from suspecting it. I can't tell youwhat she was to me, Jimmie, but in a worldful of women she was the onlyone. She was in college, too, but we had our vacations together--at alittle place on the Maine coast where her people and mine had cottagesless than a stone's throw apart."

  Barrett's cigar had gone out, but he seemed not to know it. His eyeswere half-closed, and for the moment his strong clean-cut young facelooked almost haggard. I let him take his own time. In suchconfidences it is only the sympathetic ear that is welcome; speech inany sort can scarcely be less than impertinent.

  "I shall never forget our last summer together," he went on, after abit. "It seemed as if everything conspired to make it memorable. Wewere both fond of canoeing and sailing and swimming; she could do allthree better than most men. Then there were the moonlit nights on thebeach when we sat together on the white sands and planned for thefuture, the future of clear skies, of ambitions working out theirfulfilment in the passing years, the blessed after-while in which therewere to be an ideal home a
nd little children, and always and evermorethe love that makes all things beautiful, all things possible.

  "We planned it all out in those August days and moonlit nights. I hadone more year in the university, and after that we were to be marriedand go to Europe together. No young fellow in this world ever hadbrighter prospects than I had on the day when I went back to college tobegin my senior year, Jimmie." He paused for a moment and then went onwith a deeper note in his voice. "The lights all went out, blink,between two days, as you might say. The treasurer of the company ofwhich my father was the president became an embezzler, and the crashruined us financially and practically killed my father--though thedoctors called it heart failure. And I had been at home less than amonth, trying to save something out of the wreck for my mother andsister, when I lost the girl."

  "She couldn't stand the change in circumstances?" I offered.

  "She was drowned in a yachting accident, and they never found her body."

  "Oh, good heavens!" I exclaimed, suddenly and acutely distressed andremorseful for the cynical suggestion I had thrust in.

  He shook his head slowly. "It came near smashing me, Jimmie. Itseemed so unnecessary; so hideously out of tune with everything. Ithought at the time that I should never get over it and be myselfagain, and I still think so, though the passing years have dulled thesharp edges of the hurt. There never was another girl like her, andthere never will be another--for me."

  "But you will marry, some day, Bob," I ventured.

  "Possibly--quite probably. Sentiment, of the sort our fathers andmothers knew, has gone out of fashion, and the money chase has made newmen and women of the present generation. But some of the old longingspersist for a few of us. I want a home, Jimmie, and at least a few ofthe things that the word stands for. Some day I hope to be able tofind a woman who will take what there is left of me and give me whatshe can in return. I shan't ask much because I can't give much."

  "I guess you have already found her," I said, with a dull pain at myheart.

  "Not Polly," he denied quickly. "I couldn't get my own consent tocheat a woman like Polly Everton. She has a right to demand the bestthat a man can give, and all of it. Besides, it doesn't lie altogetherwith me or my possible leanings, in Polly's case--as no man knowsbetter than yourself."

  "Oh, you are wrong there, entirely wrong!" I hastened to say. "Pollyand I are the best of good friends--nothing more."

  His smile was a deal more than half sad.

  "If there is 'nothing more,' Jimmie, it is very pointedly your ownfault," he returned. "I've been wondering what you are waiting for.You have been poking your head into the sand like a silly old ostrich,but you haven't fooled me--or Polly, either, I think--for a singleminute. What's the obstacle?"

  I was silent. Not even to so close a friend as Robert Barrett could Igive the real reason why my lips were sealed and must remain so. Hewent on, after a time, good-naturedly ignoring my hesitancy.

  "It was all right at first, of course; while we couldn't tell whetherwe had a mine or only a costly muddle of litigation. But it'sdifferent now. We are going to beat the Lawrenceburg people in theend, and apart from that, if we should split up right here and now,we've got an undivided surplus of--how much was it yesterday?--you'vegot the records."

  "A little under a million."

  "Call it nine hundred thousand to divide among the three of us. Yourshare of that would at least enable you and Polly to begin lighthouse-keeping in a five-room flat, don't you think?"

  What could I say? How could I tell him that he was opening a door forme that I could never enter; that by all the canons of decency andhonor I should never seek to enter? In the mingled emotions of themoment there was a blind anger at the thought that he had unconsciouslymade my hard case infinitely harder by showing me that my loyalty tohim was entirely needless.

  "There are good reasons why I can't think of such a thing," I began;but when I would have gone on the words froze in my throat. Since thehour was nearly midnight, the mezzanine lounge was practicallydeserted. But as I choked up and stopped, a couple, a man and a womanwho had come around from the other side of the gallery parlors, passedus on their way to the elevator alcove.

  I hardly saw the man of the pair. A second after they had passed Icould not have told whether he was black or white. That was becausethe woman, fair, richly gowned, statuesquely handsome and apparently inperfect health, was Agatha Geddis.